Jeff Skilling, Al Gore And Hard Time

It's strange to think that former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling should have had to take his case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, or that he was guilty of anything at all, assuming you apply the same standards to him that you apply to most prominent Democrat politicians. Recall that Skilling's alleged crime was to cover up the existence of accounting practices which - simply put - misrepresented debt as assets. For this, he was sentenced to almost 25 years in prison.

How is that so different, though, from the representations of generations of Democrat Pols when it comes to "trust fund" financed entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid? In his 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore infamously declared that Social Security was solvent, and that the assets that financed this program - government bonds - were in a "Lockbox". The bonds in that Lockbox, of course, were nothing more than IOUs the government had written to itself, and financed with the sale of real debt in the form of government securities, purchased by the Trillions by China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Russia.

The double standard is pretty startling. Skilling will likely be in prison for decades for misrepresenting the value of a few hundred million in debt, but Al Gore and his ilk walk the streets as free men having done so with Trillions.

Where's the "equity" in that?